The Snake Cult of Consciousness Two Years Later

How did the predictions fare?

Quetzalcoatl, the Lord of the Dawn, is, like Lucifer, closely associated with Venus. In this depiction, eyes spring from the snakes that spring from his head.

In the beginning, God created three beings: Man, Antelope, and Snake. There was only one tree, bearing red fruit. Every seven days, God would come down from the sky to pluck the fruit. One day, Snake suggested they too should eat it. Though hesitant at first, Man and his wife ate the fruit. When God next descended, he demanded to know who had eaten it. They admitted their deed and blamed Snake. As punishment, God gave Snake a medicine with which to bite people, while granting Man agriculture and different languages.

Two years ago I proposed the concept of “self” was discovered and diffused memetically via psychedelic ritual. This led to a fundamental change in human psychology, and is remembered in the world’s creation myths. To wit, the creation myth above isn’t from the Book of Genesis—though you’d be forgiven for thinking so. It’s told by the Bassari people of West Africa, recorded in 1921 by anthropologist Leo Frobenius. He was careful to note there had been no missionary influence; the tale was known widely among the Bassari as part of their ancient heritage.

The parallels to Genesis are striking: the first couple, the seven days, the serpent tempter, the forbidden fruit, divine punishment, and agriculture. How did such similar stories emerge continents apart? Harvard philologist Michael Witzel suggests in “The Origins of the World’s Mythology” that similarities in creation myths—including the Bassari Snake, Lucifer, and Quetzalcoatl—stem from a common mythological root that predates humanity’s exodus from Africa, ultimately going back over 100,000 years. But this creates more mysteries than it solves. How could such specific details survive 100,000 years of oral transmission? And if creation myths are so old, why don’t we see any narrative art until 50,000 years ago? There’s no evidence the abstract thought prerequisite to produce myths even existed 100,000 years ago. Indeed, the Sapient Paradox wonders why sapient behavior such as art was absent in most of the world until about 10,000 years ago.

A simpler explanation for the similarity may lie in cultural diffusion. Recent genetic evidence shows that agriculture, pottery, and new tools were introduced to North Africa by migrants from Europe and the Levant starting around 7,000 years ago¹. Perhaps these newcomers brought not just technology but also religion and creation myths.

The Bassari genesis is just one example of a broader pattern. From Mexico to China to Australia, snakes are omnipresent in creation myths. To appreciate how peculiar this is, imagine if, everywhere in the world, mushrooms were said to be the progenitors of the human condition. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Fungus, put a soul in the first couple. Indra obtained the Nectar of Immortality by churning the ocean of milk with a staff of shitake. Mother Mycelia offered Eve the fruit of knowledge. On every continent, rock art contained variations of:

The Tree of Life, made with MidJourney

In such a world, the natural conclusion would be that mushrooms played a role in human cultural evolution and perhaps influenced cognitive evolution if the practice went back far enough. In the Snake Cult of Consciousness I argued we live in such a world, but the primordial hallucinogen was snakes, not mushrooms. Their venom is a drug, is used ritually, and the oldest stories in every culture connect serpents to consciousness. Around the end of the ice age these snake venom rituals helped catalyze and spread human self-awareness. Hence the snake in the Garden, offering the Fruit of Knowledge.

The problem is, it’s a bit mad, no? Can you even get high on venom? How long can creation myths last? If they are memories of the discovery of the human condition, how recently did human cognitive hardware evolve? Do any experts believe anything remotely similar?

In researching those questions, the Snake Cult hypothesis has stood up surprisingly well. What follows is a recap of the surprising evidence in its favor, including:

1. A mainstream version of the Snake Cult

2. Snake venom is an entheogen

3. Genetic evidence of recent cognitive evolution

4. Archeological evidence of a Paleolithic mystery cult spreading worldwide

If you’d like to, the original essay is available here. However, the next section lays out the basic claims.

The Snake Cult by any other name

In the 2015 edition of Rock Art Research, cognitive neuroscientist Tom Froese proposed The ritualised mind alteration hypothesis of the origins and evolution of the symbolic human mind. He interprets Upper Paleolithic rock art as the beginning of a type of shamanism that was used to teach subject-object separation:

“Here we return to a theme that we have already discussed earlier, namely how consumption of psychedelics profoundly interrupts normal mental functioning. This is not to say that they are the only way to enact such interruptions, but they are certainly a powerful and for most cultures readily available option. Another factor to consider is that reflective consciousness is less needed by young infants, but becomes increasingly useful and, at least in the context of a highly symbolic culture, even necessary as maturation proceeds. On this view, the traditional prevalence of intense rites of passage during puberty, including taboos, extended periods of seclusion, social isolation, physical hardships, and the ingestion of psychedelic substances, i.e., practices which have little to do with the process of sexual maturation as such (van Gennep 1908/1960), is no longer as bizarre as it may otherwise seem. The rites’ original purpose could have been related to the facilitation of the ontogenetic development of young initiates’ normally fully situated minds into a more stabilised subject-object dualistic form, one which is more suitable for enculturation into a symbolic culture (Froese 2013).

Over time this original purpose of socially enhanced mental development would have become less essential as we and our cultural contexts co-evolved to allow individuals to more easily adapt to and reproduce a variety of highly symbolic practices (Froese and Leavens 2014), a co-evolutionary process that has been nicely illustrated by the co-evolution of the human brain and languages (Deacon 1997). Relatedly, this also explains why we should not expect that all traditional cultures still make use of profound mind alteration, because once our propensity and capacity for highly refined imitation of symbolic practices was already in place, existing symbolic content could be preserved and developed without it.”

Ancient initiation rituals often brought initiates to the edge of death, where they discovered what remains when the body begins to fail. In this liminal state, something endured: a residue of awareness we now call “I.” These controlled brushes with mortality revealed consciousness as something separate from flesh—not through argument but through direct experience. This visceral demonstration that “I” exists independent of the body was key to developing stable metacognition. It was a pedagogy of practice: show, don't tell, taken to its logical extreme. This is no longer necessary because symbolic thought has been table stakes for participating in culture for many thousands of years, and thus humans evolved to develop duality without targeted ritual intervention. Or so hypothesizes Froese.

Dr. Froese is now the editor-in-chief of Adaptive Behavior, and he still stands by this as a viable model that solves many of the issues related to human evolution. Rock art goes back about 50,000 years, so these practices must have been invented sometime since then, were an important evolutionary pressure for many thousands of years, and are now only dimly recalled in vestigial rituals. At this point, death and rebirth are mostly symbolic, such as with the Christian Eucharist². Jesus died, so you don’t have to. But in the beginning, you were the sacrifice, and in dying would learn your true nature.

You may notice that it is precisely what I proposed with the Snake Cult, though I put more emphasis on the diffusion of these practices. You can listen to our discussion of his theory on this podcast, where I get the chance to suggest snake venom as the primordial entheogen. He immediately picks up that it solves the discovery critique—snakes find you! There could have been very early rituals designed to produce altered states of consciousness, such as fasting and isolation. Someone bit by a snake realized they obtained the same state in their battle with venom, and this could have been worked into a ritual along with an antivenom.

For those keeping score, this moves the Snake Cult from not-even-fringe to solidly fringe. Progress! Other scientists that have engaged are Nick Jikomes at Mind & Matter who has a background in genetics and neuroscience, and the online journal Seeds of Science (run by a biology PhD). One of the things that has surprised me most in researching human origins is the degree to which they are an open question. We just don’t have a good model for when and how our singular intelligence evolved. And, as we’ll get to soon, even leaders in the field say we need very different models that incorporate recent evolution.

Snake Venom RAVES

Other than saying Snake Cult theory has more in common with numerology than science, the most common complaint has been that snake venom is not a drug. I’m sorry, then why do they sell it at raves?

March 18, 2024, reported by The Tribune of India

Yadav is a popular YouTuber from India, and his arrest occurred after I wrote the Snake Cult piece. In the original version, all I could do was reference academic articles like Snake venom – An unconventional recreational substance for psychonauts in India, which informs us charmers run snake dens (the thinking man’s opium den) throughout the country. This was not enough for my critics, many of whom cannot read. As such, the snake bust of Yadav has been a great boon in surfacing audiovisual content to clarify the snake situation. In neighboring Pakistan, Vice visited a snake and scorpion addiction rehab center. On Psychiatry Simplified, Dr Sanil Rege found footage of the method of intoxication:

Fang-to-tongue is apparently a common way to puff the magic dragon, which we’ll come back to. Now, you may protest that venom is just a party drug, and this doesn’t demonstrate it was used ritually. On that front, Sadhguru, one of the most popular gurus in India, delivers in the aptly titled YouTube video The Unknown Secret of how Venom works on your body [practical experience]³:

“Venom has a significant impact on one’s perception…It brings a separation between you and your body… It is dangerous because it may separate you for good…I have consumed venom in many different occasions…at one time I died because of a snake bite at another time I have come alive.”

That sounds like a dissociative, which is exactly what the doctor ordered to catalyze metacognition⁴. Back in the world of Western science, snake venom is also actively studied as a treatment for depression and Alzheimer’s due to its ability to target nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). This 2018 paper even claims, “Therefore, snake venom AChE is the best source of drug design for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.” Fascinating, and not without some precedence in the modern panacea of Gila Monster venom (Ozempric) or the classical panacea of viper flesh (Theriac).

Anyone sympathetic to the Stoned Ape Theory should prefer the Snake Cult, as venom can get the job done. Further, snakes are omnipresent in creation myths, while mushrooms are nonexistent. I mean, it’s right there in the Bible. The light bringer was a snake!⁵

When did the human brain evolve?

If creation myths recall earlier evolutionary states, then there must have been extraordinary amounts of selection in the length of time myths can last. How long is that? Well, there is very strong evidence that myths can last 10-15,000 years, as there are many examples of legends about sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. Comparative mythologists also argue that global patterns of myths featuring snakes, primordial matriarchy, creation, and the Pleiades star cluster indicate these have lasted tens of thousands of years. That is controversial, though, so let’s stick with a 15,000-year limit. Has there been significant evolution in that time period? Not according to the standard model:

The above diagram depicting when we became fully human was produced by evolutionary biologist Nicholas Longrich. “Modern DNA” is highlighted to have been established 260,000-350,000 years ago, when the Khoi San are estimated to have split from the rest of the human family tree. Language, art, music, spirituality, dance, storytelling, marriage, warfare, and biparental care define our species now, so it is assumed that all of those were fundamental parts of life then as well, even though they are not demonstrated until the Great Leap, starting about 65,000 years ago. In fact, the Sapient Paradox wonders why art, religion, and abstract thought were missing from most of the world until about 10,000 years ago (something the Snake Cult piece sought to explain).

This model assumes cognitive abilities have not evolved in the last 300,000 years. Recent genetic work demonstrates that is false. This year a study by one of the premier ancient genetics labs showed directional selection has been “pervasive” in the last 10,000 years. They gathered thousands of samples of ancient DNA and found that older samples tend to have genes associated with certain traits such as walking speed, smoking, and intelligence. Meaning we have been evolving to be smarter in the last 10,000 years. Consider this plot from the Supplementary Material, which shows the average intelligence (inferred from genes) by death date:

The genetic data shows ancient humans from 9,000 years ago had, on average, gene variants associated with IQ scores 2.3 standard deviations (about 34.5 points) lower than today’s population. This implies an average genetic potential for IQ of around 65.5 at that time. If we extrapolate this rate of change back 300,000 years, we get meaningless negative numbers—below -1,000 IQ points. Even using a more conservative linear estimate of 0.79 SD change per 10,000 years (the red line) still yields an impossible -255.5 IQ 300,000 years ago. While these extrapolations are obviously nonsensical, they highlight a crucial point: we now have hard evidence of significant cognitive evolution in just the last 10,000 years. This suggests humans from 50,000 or 100,000 years ago may have been far more cognitively different from us than previously assumed.

This aligns with the archeology. There is essentially no evidence of metacognition 100,000 years ago, and it is a human universal today. One of the great mysteries of science is how that could have happened if genetic splits go back 300,000 years. Gene-culture evolution solves this. If there was some way to teach metacognition (or grammatical language, or “I am,” or whatever Sapiens’ special sauce is), then the ability could spread across genetic lines. Snake Cult theory proposes the strongest evolutionary pressure was for developing a seamless construction of self and for that to happen at a young age.

David Reich, whose lab produced this genetic data, compares ancient genomics to Galileo’s telescope, poised to overturn our current models of human origins. Just as the telescope revealed Earth was not the center of the universe, genetic evidence is showing that human evolution didn't conveniently stop 300,000 years ago. As Reich argues, we’re on the cusp of a Copernican revolution in our understanding of human evolution. The ritualized mind hypothesis—that consciousness itself evolved through cultural practices—offers a compelling solution to the enduring mystery of how we became human.

The genetic study revealed another fascinating pattern: recent evolution affecting both schizophrenia and smoking behavior. This connection isn’t coincidental—70-80% of schizophrenia patients smoke, likely because both conditions involve the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). These neural receptors are crucial for cognition and conscious awareness. If you recall from earlier, the fact that snake venom targets nAChRs is why venom is being studied to treat Alzheimer’s⁶.

I’m not suggesting that snake venom rituals were the primary driver of selection against schizophrenia and smoking. Rather, over the last 50,000 years, symbolic thought gradually became table stakes for participating in society. In fits and bursts at first, and then all at once. Early on, thousands of tribes would have developed different cultures with varied (and tenuous) relationships to inner life. One group discovered that snake venom could reliably induce “separation between you and your body.” This practice, along with associated mystery cults and cultural innovations, spread because it worked, perhaps around the end of the Ice Age. The fact that snake venom targets the same neural receptors that have been under recent selection is fascinating supporting evidence.

This hypothesis makes testable predictions: we should find evidence of consciousness-altering rituals spreading in the late Paleolithic, and these practices should be teeming with serpent symbolism. The bullroarer has been studied for over a century and provides us with just that.

Consider the Bullroarer

A 14,000-year-old bullroarer from France

The bullroarer is a simple object: a slat of wood, bone, or stone attached to a string that is swung around to produce a whirring sound. This could easily have been reinvented many times. However, the pattern of ritual associations around it is shockingly similar worldwide. Back in 1920, anthropologist Robert Lowie wrote:

“The question is not whether the bull-roarer has been invented once or a dozen times, nor even whether this simple toy has once or frequently entered ceremonial associations. I have myself seen priests of the Hopi Flute fraternity whirl bullroarers on extremely solemn occasions, but the thought of a connection with Australian or African mysteries never obtruded itself because there was no suggestion that women must be excluded from the range of the instrument. There lies the crux of the matter. Why do Brazilians and Central Australians deem it death for a woman to see the bullroarer? Why this punctilious insistence on keeping her in the dark on this subject in West and East Africa and Oceania? I know of no psychological principle that would urge the Ekoi and the Bororo mind to bar women from knowledge about bull-roarers and until such a principle is brought to light I do not hesitate to accept diffusion from a common center as the more probable assumption. This would involve historical connection between the rituals of initiation into the male tribal societies of Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, and Africa and would still further confirm the conclusion that sex dichotomy is not a universal phenomenon springing spontaneously from the demands of human nature but an ethnographical feature originating in a single center and thence transmitted to other regions.”

Lowie was instrumental in developing modern anthropology, twice serving as editor of the American Anthropologist. He was not some peripheral voice. EM Loeb, an anthropologist at Berkeley, followed this in 1929, adding:

“The case for diffusion is even stronger than stated by Lowie. Not only is the bull-roarer tabooed to women when used in connection with male initiation rites, but it is also almost invariably represented as the voice of spirits. Nor does the bull-roarer travel alone in connection with male initiation rites. This paper has demonstrated the fact that a form of tribal marking, a death and resurrection ceremony, and an impersonation of ghosts or spirits is found among male tribal initiation rites as the usual concomitants of the bull-roarer. There is no psychological principle involved which would necessarily group these elements together, and they therefore must be regarded as having been fortuitously grouped in one locality of the world, and then disseminated as a complex.”

This complex, Loeb argued, included: “(1) the use of the bullroarer, (2) the impersonation of ghosts, (3) the “death and resurrection” initiation, and (4) the mutilation by cutting.” This is an extremely good fit for Froese’s model of how to teach subject-object separation. My contribution is connecting Lowie and Froese and hypothesizing that the ritual may have used snake venom.

Lowie was a specialist in the American Southwest, where the bullroarer ceremony of the Hopi is of particular interest to the Snake Cult. Here is a Hopi portrait of one of their “snake dancers” in ceremonial garb, swinging a bullroarer.

Hopi Indian in ceremonial dress whirls a bullroarer decorated with a snake

Why are they called snake dancers? Well, they dance with snakes, as can be seen in this early 20th century photo:

Yes, those are rattlesnakes. Apparently, no one died, as the women made a traditional antivenom, which was consumed before the celebration (reminiscent of Indra consuming a drink before engaging the primordial serpent Vritra)⁷.

The antiquity of these practices is evidenced by rock art dating back thousands of years. Petroglyphs throughout the region depict figures dancing with snakes, and in some cases, such as at Moab, Utah, even show human figures with serpents in their mouths. These ancient images suggest that ritualized encounters with venomous snakes were a key part of indigenous American spirituality long before European contact.

The Eleusinian Mysteries

Dionysian celebrant (Maenad) with a snake in her hair. Greece, 490–480 BC.

If I were writing in Lowie’s day, I would not have to introduce the Mysteries. In the early 20th century, to be educated was to understand the Greeks, and to understand the Greeks is to know the Mysteries. But, those days are long gone, so I will borrow words from the Roman orator Cicero. The Romans copy-pasted as much of Greek culture as they could. Looking back at that effort, Cicero waxed eloquent about Eleusis:

“For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those Mysteries. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized.”⁸

You may have heard of Greek Tragedy. That art form grew out of the Mysteries. You may have heard of Marcus Aurelius. He was an initiate at Eleusis, and when the temple was sacked, he rebuilt it, commemorating his involvement with a bust of himself with a snake carved into his chest.

The temple’s secret rites centered on themes of death and rebirth through the story of Dionysus. The myth tells how young Dionysus was lured to his death by the Titans using four objects that we must assume were also present in the ceremonies: a snake, an apple, a mirror, and a bullroarer.

Classicist Carl Ruck, who coined the term ‘entheogen’ (literally ‘god within’) to describe psychoactive substances used in religious contexts, has studied Mediterranean mystery cults for decades. He argues there was a widespread practice of using snake venom in these rites of death and rebirth.

“Serpents were milked to access their venom as psychoactive toxins, both to serve as arrow poisons, but also as unguents in sub-lethal dosages to access sacred states of ecstasy.”

That research is from 2016, but even going back to 1976 the classic of feminist archeology When God Was a Woman spends several pages speculating that snake venom was used as a drug in the cult of the Mother Goddess, citing both Eleusis and the Hopi. I am not the first to stumble on this idea, though I may be the first to connect it to cognitive evolution.

It is a bizarre fact pattern I barely dreamed of when I writing the original essay. In the 19th and 20th centuries, anthropologists tried to understand the human condition by looking beyond their European traditions. Surprisingly, they found that at the heart of other cultures there was a bullroarer cult as well, often associated with creation or the first ancestor, as well as a similar ritual complex of death and rebirth. The most natural explanation was that this spread sometime deep in the past, perhaps even before the Agricultural Revolution. The Nature editorial board even took this position in 1929⁹. If all that wasn’t enough, poisonous snakes are used in two of the most prominent versions of the ceremonies: among the Hopi and Greeks. Science works by making predictions. “Death and rebirth snake cult that is mythically associated with the birth of the human condition” should not fit so cleanly into world history.

Conclusion

Demeter Gives Her Chariot to Triptolemus. Drawn by serpents across the sky, he spread the Eleusinian Mysteries to distant lands.

It’s early days yet, but as we continue to collect genetic and archeological data, we will be surprised by how much our brains have changed in the last 50,000 years and how deeply intertwined cultures are around the world. The evidence for fully sapient behavior is extremely spotty globally until about 10,000 years ago. My bet is that can be explained by gene-culture interaction. We know the domesticated dog spread worldwide in the last 15,000 years. I propose that a snake cult did as well, which included the toolkit to domesticate ourselves. The mysteries at the heart of this cult live on in our myths. Lucifer, the lightbringer, tempting Eve. Nuwa and Fuxi, the first couple in China, invariably depicted as half-snake. And the Rainbow Serpent, who brought language and ritual to Australia at the beginning of time.

My timeline is that symbolic thought began to emerge about 100,000 years ago with the first rudimentary art and burials. However, the symbol “I” was only experienced in a very fractured way until much more recently. Selection for the seamless construction of “I” increased when methods to teach it spread worldwide about 15,000 years ago with the Snake Cult. Venom was used, but fasting, dance, meditation, or other hallucinogens were viable paths as well, and there would have been many versions over the millennia. The central assumption of the model is that “I am” was a discovery, which then implies it could spread. All one has to do is instruct someone else how to have the epiphany. Once such methods existed, what could stop their spread? The half-conscious tribe next door? They would have been one-shotted by Quetzalcoatl.

There is a lot of other research I would have liked to include. Did you know that deep in the Congo rainforest the Pygmy creation myth closely mirrors Genesis? That the word for “I” across language families is far more similar than it should be by chance? Or did you know that wheat was first domesticated where Eden is described in Genesis? And that this is right by Gobekli Tepe, the first temple, where snakes are the primary iconography, and bullroarers were used ritually? I discuss that and much more in other articles, with the most complete model presented in the Eve Theory of Consciousness, which adds a gendered component: women founded the Snake Cult. Finally, if you’re wondering why such a theory would appear on a blog rather than a journal of anthropology, I address why the bullroarer is not better known in this essay.

Nuwa and Fuxi, the first couple in China.

1. Another paper finds similar timelines for haplotype R1b entering Chad

2. Froese does not specifically say the Christian sacraments are vestigial; I use it as the best-known example. However, mythologists such as Joseph Campbell argued that the rituals surrounding Christ’s resurrection were vestigial to the more literal death-and-rebirth practices that go back to the agricultural revolution. That is the entire point of his Historical Atlas of World Mythology, which starts with hunter-gather mythology (The Way of Animal Powers) and shows how agricultural cultures adapted those ideas (The Way of the Seeded Earth), and finally developed into modern religions in the Axial Age (The way of Man).

The Snake Cult can be seen as an argument that the core innovation of Paleolithic religion was a method to teach “I am.” They invented being. Today, all culture is a riff off this idea. Or as the Upanishads put it: “In the beginning, there was only the Great Self in the form of a Person. Reflecting, it found nothing but itself. Then its first word was: “This am I!” whence arose the name “I” (Aham).”

3. There are dozens of similar fan edits from accounts like Spiritual Awakening with titles like “Why I Drank Cobra Venom?” available on YouTube.

4. or Eve, as it may be

5. Lucifer means light bringer

6. See also this recent paper on the mechanism of snake venom: “Therefore, it is plausible that there is a specific correlation between snake venom-induced neurological impairments and CHRNA7 [Neuronal acetylcholine receptor subunit alpha-7]. Similarly, CHRNA1 is also involved in neurodevelopment, neuroplasticity, and the development of mental disorders (including bipolar disorder).”

7. Similar hints of antivenom are what originally sent me down the snake cult rabbit hole. Many of the plants associated with snakes in myth (ie, apples, lotus, fennel) are excellent sources of rutin, an effective antivenom.

8. M. Tullius Cicero, De Legibus, ed. Georges de Plinval, Book 2.14.36

9. “From the distribution it is inferred that these traits are of archaic, possibly palaeolithic, origin, and not a matter of recent diffusion. As regards the bull-roarer, earlier theories are to be regarded as untenable. It would be possible to regard it as of independent origin in different regions only if attention were confined to its use as a toy or for purposes of magic. In connexion with initiation and secret societies, it is always associated with a form of tribal marking, a death and resurrection ceremony, and an impersonation of ghosts and spirits. It is tabooed to women and is invariably represented as the voice of spirits; but when found outside the area of initiation rites and secret societies it is neither. As there is no psychological principle which debars women from the sight of the instrument in Oceania, Africa, and the New World, it cannot be regarded as due to an independent origin and it must be inferred that it has been diffused from a common centre.”